I popped onto Twitter this morning to discover that I have suddenly become popular in Russia again. Or at least in Imaginary Russia, home to countless imaginary Russians used by Twitterers who aren’t as popular as they want to be, in order to pad their follower account and make themselves look more popular. If you are so inclined, you can buy these imaginary Russians (and imaginary humans of many other nationalities) in bulk from specialists in the imaginary Russian Twitter user business.

It’s possible that the fake followers today are a sort of a weird retaliation for my post yesterday about Roosh Valizadeh’s short story about a dude killing a “social justice” blogger; the Manosphere-blogger-turned-GamerGater with the fake Twitter followers that I wrote about in my original post is good friends with Mr. V.

He has claimed that a lot of his fake followers were bought for him from someone else. So it’s possible he or his friends are trying to retroactively “prove” this by buying me fake followers, though this is just speculation on my part. Though it’s not clear how doing something unethical now (buying me and others fake Twitter followers) would be proof that you didn’t do something unethical before (buy Twitter followers for yourself).

At the very least, it shows that you know where to go to buy fake Twitter followers and how you can safely buy them without Russian hackers getting hold of your credit card number. (I have no idea.)

But, again, I have no proof of who did any of this. I’m just making educated guesses.

Jaclyn Friedman, who has tangled both with AVFMers and #GamerGaters in the past, and who got hit with fake followers at the same time I did before, also found herself with many thousands more fake Twitter followers today.

I set my Twitter account private about an hour ago to, at least temporarily, stem the tide of fake followers. (When your account is private, you have to approve any new followers; they aren’t added to your account automatically) Since then, I’ve gotten another 1300 fake followers trying to sneak in the door. I’ll be taking the account public again to tweet this post. We’ll see what happens.

Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in.

Brilliant, dudes. No one will see through your cunning plan, whatever the hell your cunning plan is.

I sort of wish I could have this guy to handle my new Twitter followers.

EDIT: Removed an extra zero from a number. 1300 more would-be fake followers trying to sneak in, not 13,000.

I suppose they are relying on the lack of hard evidence connecting any one of them to the follower purchase, therefore saying “look some mysterious individual purchased twitter followers for you, totes what happened to us!!”

There’s a reactionary student paper at University of Minnesota Morris who blames missing and defaced issues on PZ. His evidence that PZ took the missing copies is that “there was a strong smell of formaldehyde lingering around the newsstand.” (paraphrase)

Campus police asked PZ to submit a handwriting sample so they could compare his handwriting to the defacing. They haven’t made their conclusions public yet, but it’s fodder for a sovereign citizen who’s harassing simply everyone with an email address at UMM, complaining about how he hasn’t been given a copy of the handwriting sample and that it’s an illegal violation of freedom of information.

We can tell he’s a sovereign citizen because he spells his name with a comma and phrases every sentence in his emails as a question by adding “doesn’t it,” “isn’t it,” or something similar to the end.

Awesome! Everyone I know who studied Russian in high school hated it and their teachers and didn’t learn anything, apparently.

I was in a relationship with a Russian man for 13 years – because of this, I started out taking classes because I wanted to understand what he and all his friends were talking about, but then ended up getting a degree in it and living there (Saint Petersburg) for a while.

Awesome! Everyone I know who studied Russian in high school hated it and their teachers and didn’t learn anything, apparently.

Here in Finland Russian would be even potentially useful, but people tend to ignore that because we seriously want to be in the “western” cultural sphere. Only relatively few people study Russian, and most of them probably hate it.

My mother used to be a russophile (and a prof translator), although not so much lately, I hear. While moving my stuff, I just found I still have a Finnish translation of a Russian Soviet-era children’s collection of indigenous Siberian fairy tales.

I have a little Russian. A very little. I studied it for an hour a week for 12 weeks in High School ( ie 30 years ago). I can politely start a question, ask ‘Where is…?’ and say ‘I am travelling to…’ And know the word for tea. That is vital 🙂

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